In a previous post, I said that I got a Raspberry Pi – a very very impressive $25 (mine is the $35 version) single board computer. I’ve been spending the last few days just using it to get familiar with the OS. I use Debian on the Raspberry Pi which has differences when compared with Fedora (which I use on my desktop). One problem is that when you connect a few cables to the board, they start pulling it. This makes it hard to keep it in one place and so a case is very necessary. After checking out a few ideas online, I made one myself.

Like this:

So I’ve finally got myself something I’ve been wanting for a long time – an FPGA board. FPGAs are extremely useful for building large digital systems. All you need to do is write code in either VHDL or Verilog and you’re done (well not quite. There are a few more steps but we’ll look at that later). Originally, I was planning to buy a DSP board from Texas Instruments. However, a friend at MITx (More on that in another blog post) told me about the boards made by Digilent (Thanks Hobie!). Till now, the boards I found were too costly for me. There were a few with Digilent that were perfect! I decided to go with the Nexys3. Read more of this post